Many Roads To Home
by DeBrabant
Summary: SPOILERS FOR THE END OF THE SERIES: After their confrontation, Vash takes Knives to an oasis to heal his mind and their relationship. But when a baby enters the mix, things become ever so much more complicated!
1. Prologue

Many Roads To Home  
By Danii (DeBrabant)  
WARNING: SPOILERS FOR THE END OF THE SERIES. IF YOU HAVENT SEEN IT AND DON'T WISH TO BE SPOILED, DON'T READ ON.  
Summary: After their confrontation, Vash takes Knives to a special place to mend his brother's ways and the relationship between them. However, when Vash finds a baby and decides to raise it, the world will never be the same.  
Disclaimer: I don't own Trigun, the world of Trigun, or any of the original characters from it. Vash, Millie, Knives, Meryl, Wolfwood, etc. Evie, Vincent, Stephen, and the Quads ARE mine though, so please ask if you wish to use them...  
Distribution: You want? Take. Just put my name on it and tell me where it is...I have to know that so I can brag...:)  
Feedback: Is a must! I'm no blackmailing you, I'm just telling you that if she isn't fed, my muse throws a pissy-fit and strikes, which results in sucky chapters...So, in the most polite way I can say it, please, if you like the story or feel the need to give me creative criticism, PLEASE DO!   
Dedication: To Tori, without whom I never would have discovered Vash and his friends (and enemies). And to Liz...just because...  
Note: This is my first work in this fandom, so if I get any characters wrong, or a little OOC, don't chop me up with a chainsaw. But as said above, constructive criticism is welcome! Also, if there is something in here that doesn't jive with the anime (which isn't all that likely since I saw the whole thing and it takes place after) or the manga (which is likely, since I haven't seen any of that) please let me know and I'll try to fix it.  
  
And now:  
  
In the middle of an oasis over 200 iles from the city of December, a man stopped walking. Then, with careful deliberation, the man took a look around the lush green garden that was so unlike the sandy area surrounding it, and dropped the large bundle that he'd been carrying on his shoulder for some time.  
  
The bundle made a grunting noise as it hit the ground.  
  
"Knives, you can get up now..." said the man, his lips curved into a satisfied smile as he continued to survey the oasis.  
  
There was some movement from within the bundle, and then more, followed by muffled words that told the man that his passenger was not in a particularly happy mood.  
  
"Come on out, Knives..." the man repeated with a broad grin, "Come out and see our new home..."  
  
And then the one called Knives finally found his way out from the burlap of the bundle, his white-blonde hair sticking out like some sort of desert plant at first, followed by a head, and a heavily bandaged body. From what the man could see, his passenger wasn't too badly hampered in his movements by the injuries, or by the bandages over them. Knives was jerking his head around enough to make that point well enough.  
  
"Vash?" Knives asked, rather dazed and more then a little confused. He wasn't quite sure what had happened at the moment...why he was in a sack, why he had several wounds, why he was with his brother, or why he was in THIS oasis, which was rather different then the one he'd been in before going unconscious. "Vash, where are we?"  
  
The man called Vash smiled, then raised an eyebrow at his brother and did a sweeping gesture with his arm to encompass the entirety of the forest-like area around them.  
  
"We're home."  
  
Now it was Knives' turn to raise an eyebrow. "Home?"  
  
"Home." Vash replied with an explicit nod as he approached his brother, "This is going to be our new home. And just like Rem said, I'm going to take care of you..."  
  
Immediately, Knives' muscles began to stiffen at the mention of the brothers' childhood caretaker, but as they did, the white-blonde man was struck with an amazing amount of pain. He was no stranger to pain, but the several different sources of it striking at once made him nearly fall over. His brother noticed and was supporting him before he could tumble to the ground.  
  
"Whoa now..." Vash said soothingly, his green eyes staring into his brother's with nothing but care and concern, "Steady...steady...don't get yourself worked up..."  
  
"Why not?" Knives exclaimed hatefully as he turned away from Vash's gaze, "You won. You and your non-sensible ideals...your humans...the humans you love...always more then me..."  
  
Hurt and alarm filled those sea green eyes now, and while Knives could no longer see it, he could hear it in Vash's voice.  
  
"Why do you have to make it exclusive? Why can't I love them and you at the same time?"  
  
"Because they're filth!" Knives cried angrily. As he said it, he tried to pull away from Vash. He didn't want to touch his brother, didn't want to be around him when he was speaking such nonsense. But unfortunately, the pain struck him again, and instead of running away, he simply fell hard onto the ground.  
  
"Knives!"  
  
"They're horrible." He screamed from the ground, his white-blonde hair getting dirty in the wet earth, "They waste and destroy! They use our kind-"  
  
"Will you try?" Vash asked, suddenly interrupting his brother's rant.  
  
Knives stopped, the confusion cooling his rage, and looked at Vash. "What?"  
  
"Will you try to make this our home?" the blonde repeated, his eyes filled with an amazing need to be understood, "Will you just forget about exterminating what you see as lower beings and just live here, with me? Just the two of us, like you always said you wanted. You and I...here...in our own personal Eden?"  
  
The other was struck at the simple desire in his brother's voice. Truly, that was all Vash wanted. For the moment only, perhaps, but that was Vash's only wish. And truth be told, it had always been his wish. To be with his brother without the interference of all those horrible humans...to have Eden.  
  
There was silence between the two for a moment, and then slowly, painfully, Knives pushed himself up until he was standing beside Vash. He gave the blonde a hard, searching look, and then embraced him suddenly as if his brother might disappear any second. Vash was surprised at this, but almost immediately squeezed Knives back, assuring him. It felt so much like the time before the butterfly and the spider. Before the crash. Before they'd become so different.  
  
It felt right.  
  
Then Vash felt the bandages and winced slightly at the pain he had caused his brother. It was necessary pain, he knew, but it still hurt him to know that he'd shot Knives.  
  
"Come on..." Vash said finally, "We have a lot of work to do. We have to build a house, we have to set up a little area to farm food from, we have to-"  
  
The bandages scrapped against his suit and Knives grunted softly.  
  
"Well, I have a lot of work to do, and you have a lot of healing to do."  
  
To this, Knives nodded and let go of his brother, sliding slowly to the ground to lie down on the burlap. It wasn't the most comfortable of beds, but it did its job. Vash smiled at him, then turned around to begin making some sort of lodging from surrounding brush and wood.   
  
Just for them, the two in Eden. 


	2. Babe in the Garden

"What the hell is that, Vash?"  
  
It had been two years since the two brothers had settled in the little oasis called Eden, and in that time, much had changed.  
  
There was now a cleared are in the middle of the oasis, and in that area sat a hut, constructed rather amazingly out of wood and grasses. It was comfortable, with one large room that was used for everything, and was obviously lived in.  
  
Another change was the little area beside the hut, which had been tamed for farming vegetables and one or two fruits. Neat and orderly, it provided almost all the food for the two men, though till that day, Knives didn't know exactly where the seeds had come from.   
  
But the most important change was within Vash and Knives.  
  
Vash had become much more relaxed. He smiled more often, and while his goofy behavior was truly he who was, he no longer felt the need to use it to cover up his true feelings about anything. He was honest and open for the first time in years, and it truly made him much happier.  
  
Knives, despite the one hundred and thirty plus years of hatred toward humanity, hadn't been able to stand up to his brother's determined 'lessons' as much as he'd thought, and while Vash had initially said that he just wanted to live peacefully with Knives, the blonde brother had used his actions and words carefully to act as sort of a living lesson in tolerance, which resulted in a great deal of bickering, but didn't weaken the relationship between the two.   
  
Stories of his travels, stories of the people he'd met...Vash, in a way which belied his joking exterior, used all of them subtly to show his brother that humans did have noble aspects, and that they deserved to live as much as them. And because of this, Knives great driving hatred toward humanity had transformed into something closer to an aloof dislike which was made easier by the lack of humans in their little Garden.  
  
Until that day.  
  
"Vash, what the hell is that?" Knives repeated.  
  
His brother raised an eyebrow softly, then opened the bundle further so that his brother could perhaps figure it out. When the white-blonde simply drew back, Vash answered the question.  
  
"It's a baby, Knives..." he answered with a smile, "I found her outside. Her mother had..."  
  
Now the smile flattened to a look of sadness.   
  
"Her mother died, Knives...I found her and the thomas dead in the dunes outside, but the baby was still alive, so I took back with me. I wish I'd gone out earlier...maybe I would have found the mother in time to sa-"  
  
"Vash!" cried his brother angrily, pointing at the baby in his arms, "What on earth are you talking about? What is that doing here? It's supposed to be-"  
  
"She."  
  
Vash used the moment of confused silence from his brother to continue.  
  
"The baby is a she, a girl, Knives..."  
  
There was another few seconds of silence from the other man, and then an explosion.  
  
"I don't care what it is! I don't want it around us! I don't...aw...don't give me the look, don't...don't, Vash, I can't...stop it with the look..."  
  
Vash turned up the volume on the puppy-dog eyes, knowing that his brother, while being stubborn and slightly insane, could never deny him anything really. Not when he gave him the eyes...  
  
"Vash..."  
  
"Please..." Vash said in all seriousness, "I can't take her to December...she won't survive it. And I won't let her die. Here's your chance, Knives...your chance to really see how wonderful humans can be. And haven't you always said that nurture is as important as nature?"  
  
Knives gave him a sideways glance that reminded him like nothing else of when they were children. They would fight over which game to play, and Vash always knew when he'd won when Knives gave him a sideways glance of reluctance, one last act of rebellion. He was seeing that look on Knives now, and smiled inwardly.  
  
"Fine...keep it away from me though." And with that Knives walked off.  
  
"Her! The baby is a her!"  
  
"Her, It...I don't care!" shouted Knives from behind the hut somewhere.  
  
"Evie!" Vash yelled back with a sudden burst of inspiration.  
  
"What?" asked his brother as he poked his head out from behind the hut.  
  
"Her name is Evie..." the blonde said with a smile, snuggling the small bundle a little closer, "Poetic, don't you think?"  
  
Knives raised an aggravated eyebrow. "It was Adam that went to the garden first you know, brother..."  
  
"All the same..." Vash murmured with a grin as he looked down at the child. Two little blue eyes looked up at him beneath a tuft of curly black hair, almost asking him what all the yelling was about.  
  
"Just your uncle Knives being silly..." the former gunman said with a roll of his eyes and a smile, "But don't you worry...he'll get to like you as much as your daddy does, yes he will...he's just being stubborn. Sure, he was ready to destroy everything two years ago, but I'm sure after you and me-"  
  
"I can hear you!" shouted Knives angrily.  
  
The baby smiled.  
  
"I know, Evie...I know..."  
  
TBC 


	3. The Snake Retracts His Fangs

"VASH!"   
  
The Humanoid Typhoon, the man with the $$60,000,000,000 on his head, turned around, his eyes steely and focused as he searched for the source of the scream. When he finally saw it, the only being classified as an Act of God stared for a minute, and then fell over laughing.  
  
There, in the area of the hut which contained their crude kitchen, sat Knives, his entire head and a good deal of his body white with the majority of the flour Vash had gotten on the last supply run. And above him, perched on a small stool like a perfect angel, was Evie, her grin almost cutting her face in half.  
  
"Why you little-" the white-blonde (currently plain white) haired man growled as he began to jump up to do something that was probably unpleasant, but then he was stopped by a hand on his shoulder. It wasn't the force that halted Knives, but the gentle touch which brought him back to the world.  
  
It didn't, however, remove any of his anger.  
  
"Vash, that little...little-"  
  
"Evie" his brother replied calmly.  
  
"EVIE...just spilled half the bag of flour on my head!"  
  
Vash raised an eyebrow, looked to the floury mess, and then at the little girl on the stool. She lowered her eyes in just the right way, then, as scheduled, made the expected whimpering noise.  
  
"I can see."  
  
"Vash, that was a week's worth of flour!" Knives complained, "What she did was not only stupid, but wreck less and-"  
  
The calming hand gave a soft squeeze, letting the brother on the floor that his sibling knew exactly what he meant.  
  
"Knives?"  
  
"What!?"  
  
"Did you manage to finish the bread for the week?"  
  
His brother looked up at him like he was crazy.   
  
"Yeah? So?"  
  
"But you had yet to make the donuts?"  
  
Knives again looked at him like he was crazy, but Evie's growing expression of horror told Vash that she'd realized what he was doing. A genius is one thing, but a child will immediately figure out how they're being punished.   
  
Vash smiled.  
  
"Well then, that all works out..." he said as he ambled to the stool and picked up the little girl who was giving him one hell of a death glare, "Evie used the flour this way, so she can't use it for donuts later, and thus won't get any till next week..."  
  
"But Dad! Uncle Knives was-"  
  
"No 'buts'..." Vash said calmly with a shake of his head as he deposited his daughter onto the floor away from the mess, "Next time, you'll think better of dumping our supplies on someone..."  
  
Evie looked to her dad, and then to her uncle. Her dad, as expected, was giving her a half-loving, half-stern look, which meant that she'd be off the hook in his mind in a few minutes, but that the punishment was sticking. Her uncle, on the other hand, was glaring at her with a self-satisfied smirk that made the young girl think to herself how childlike her supposedly 'superior breed' (as he often told her) uncle acted a great deal of the time.  
  
"Now you run along now...maybe you could work on that new doll you've been talking about for ages..." Vash prompted. It was a tell tale signal that her dad wanted to talk in private with her uncle. Evie took the signal, nodded, then tottered off as she was expected to in order to work on the doll.  
  
Vash watched her go for a moment, then turned to his brother with something between anger and frustration.  
  
"You don't always have to criticize everything Evie does, you know..." he said to Knives, his voice soft yet concerned.  
  
"Perhaps you should spend more time on your own little 'doll' so that there is less to criticize..." his brother answered snidely.  
  
"We all make mistakes," Vash reminded him.  
  
"Humans more then us..."  
  
In answer, his brother merely raised an eyebrow.  
  
"She...she doesn't think before she does things! She's far too slow in learning simple equations, she reads like-"  
  
"Knives! She's five years old...and may I say, exceptionally bright for her age."  
  
"I wouldn't say-"  
  
"She's been stashing donuts for the last four days preparing to do that to you..." Vash replied with a dry laugh and an almost smug smile, "You really underestimate her, and she knows it..."   
  
Knives just stared back at his brother.  
  
"You mean you gave her that punishment KNOWING that she was prepared?"  
  
Now Vash looked serious.  
  
"I gave that punishment knowing that you had provoked her."  
  
Knives didn't answer, so the former gunman went on.  
  
"Look, I know that you resent her presence here because, initially, I promised it would be me and you."  
  
"And because she's a filthy human..."  
  
"But you must admit that-"  
  
Now the white-blonde rocketed up from his spot and stood facing his brother, his face twisted in a snarl.  
  
"I will admit nothing. She's still an intruder! An intruder to our home, an intruder to the goal you set, and an intruder to us, our br-"  
  
"That's ridiculous!" Vash shouted back, "She's a child. A child who need a home, a place to grow. She's no intruder. She is my daughter. You might not think that she is, but in my heart, which is the most important place, she is. And as such, she is as close to me as you are!"  
  
Now his brother's eyes went wide in a deep and panicked shock. Knives couldn't believe it. That little...urchin? As close to Vash as himself? But they were brothers! Brothers by breed, brothers by birth...  
  
"But..."  
  
"If you love me...if you truly love me as a brother and aren't just trying to play with my mind for some petty scheme...if you care anything for me...care for her. Love her as you love me, then. Help her learn and grow and become someone you'll be proud to know. Stop complaining about her and help me raise her."  
  
"I-"  
  
"I'm not asking you to be Mr. Perfect Mommy, Knives...just..."  
  
At this, words left Vash and he simply used his eyes to convey the message.  
  
The white-blonde didn't answer for a moment.  
  
"I'm never going to love her like I love you, brother..."  
  
"Kni-"  
  
"But...I will help you. I'll...stop whining and complaining about her, and I will try to be at least...civil with the little brat. I'll teach her what I can, perhaps make her a little more enlightened then the average human beast, and maybe when she's grown and gone, you'll come to your senses agai-"  
  
Knives didn't finish because Vash had engulfed him in a life-threatening hug which didn't look like it was going to end soon. It made Knives thankful that he wasn't human even more...a human wouldn't survive half of his brother's joyous affections. 


End file.
